Home refinance to fix Great Depression 2.0

Yesterday's Wall St Journal had a piece on home refinancing. With home mortgage rates in the cellar (4% !!) people could refinance and reduce their monthly mortgage payments. They estimated that refinancing from a 6% mortgage to a 4% mortgage could save the borrower several thousand dollars a year. Not bad.
In the past, consumers have rushed out and spent such savings. The Keynesians see a massive home refinancing creating the demand needed to get the economy growing again. Other, saner, commenters think the consumers would use the windfall savings to pay down credit card debt, or just put it in the bank rather than spending it.
Me, I think American consumers are rational. In these times of layoffs and job losses, the rational thing to do is save the money in case of job loss. Which can happen to anyone, anytime. And the consumers know it.

Consumer Confidence

The official US govt index of consumer confidence has been sinking, with the steepest decline coming right after the Washington debt limit kerfuffle of a couple a weeks ago. NPR commented about this on the morning talk show. The gist of the radio piece was "Oh dear, those terrible Republicans, they got the consumers all upset and now they won't spend money and Great Depression 2.0 will never end."
The way I see it, the Republicans made the country, voters, consumers and even a few politicians realize that the US govt is broke and getting more broke every day. A fact the news media had been concealing from the public. There is now a chance to do something before the United States of America gets flushed down the same drain the Greeks are swirling down. Wising up the public is a good thing.

Computer Models.

A computer model is actually a computer program that computes future results. The most famous computer models out there are the ones predicting global warming. There are many of the models and they have been criticized from many angles.
Without going into specific criticisms, remember, a computer model will predict what the programmer wants it to predict. If the model makes undesired predictions, the programmer assumes there is something wrong with the program and makes changes to fix the problem. I used to program for my day job, and I wrote a computer model or two over the years. Neither model produced the desired (right) answers first time I ran the code. One had a bug that I fixed, and the other never did give the "right" answers. That one showed us that a design approach we liked was never gonna work, and we changed the design. Thank goodness we were open minded enough to listen to the model and not waste money going down a blind alley.
But you gotta watch those computer models. Basically models will tell you, what you want to hear. Or what the programmer wanted you to hear. The Hadley CRU climate model, leaked to the web last year, had a single line of code that "scaled" (boosted) recent temperatures to produce the "hockey stick" graph of temperature over time.

Nova on "Climate Change"

Watched a three hour rerun of Nova last night, the three shows on human evolution. Actually three one hour shows rebroadcast back to back on Vermont public TV. Not bad stuff, they described some newly discovered human fossils that I had never heard of. They described the rise and 2 million year existence of a human precursor with a chimpanzee size brain, but who walked upright. The famous fossil Lucy was a member of this group.
They glossed over some things. They described the Neanderthal DNA sequencing, including creation of the Neanderthal genotype. Neanderthals are very close to modern man DNA wise. Then they said very few Neanderthal genes exist in modern humans. If Neanderthal and human genotypes are very similar, how can you tell which genes are Neanderthal and which are modern? This was used to support the idea that modern humans "out competed" (wiped out) Neanderthal man, as opposed to the less blood thirsty idea that modern man interbred with Neanderthals and so absorbed them. They made no mention of some fossils that surely look half modern and half Neanderthal. I saw one such fossil on display in the Peabody museum some years ago. I ought to go back and see if it's still on display.
And they seemed obsessed with climate change. Every few minutes they described massive and life threatening climate changes over the last 10 million years. With one exception they didn't connect climate change with human evolutionary progress, but they sure let us know that climate change was out there and to be feared. The one connect that makes sense is walking upright. That seems a perfectly reasonable adaptation for a tree climbing, tree living ape, when the lush tropical jungle dries out to grass lands, where you gotta walk and run to get around, as opposed to Tarzan style swinging thru the treetops on handy vines (brachiation I believe they call it). But other than that one idea, the connection between massive climate changes and human evolution was left unclear. But they sure let you know about all that dreadful climate changing.

Missed Confederate opportunity

Been reading John Keegan's Civil War. Keegan spends a good deal of time discussing strategy, as in what strategy would win the war. Keegan points out that Confederate forces in border state Kentucky could have attacked Cincinnati, and pushed north thru Ohio to Lake Eire, cutting the Union in half. It's only 150 miles from Cincinnati on the Ohio River to Toledo on Lake Eire. As far as Keegen can see, the Confederates never thought of this strategy. The closest they came was Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, which could have threatened both Washington and Baltimore. It resulted in the battle of Gettysburg, a Union victory. Had Lee prevailed at Gettysburg, he would have been in a position to do the Union great harm.
Keegan is making the point that the successful Civil War strategy involved cutting the opponent into pieces. Grant and Sherman's capture of the Mississippi cut Texas off. Sherman's march to the sea cut the remainder of the Confederacy in half.

Cannot comment on my own blog!!!

I saw, read, and enjoyed several comments posted within the last couple of days. I attempted to reply to all of them. For reasons unknown, blogger refused to post my comments. I'll let you know when I get my commenting privileges back.

The Double Negative

"I ain't got no time." Bugaboo of English teachers every where. If you believe in mathematical logic, then you understand that negating a negative makes it positive. A hard concept from 8th grade math class. If A is a proposition then not A is the opposite. If A is true, not A is false. And not not A is true.
And yet the double negative persists in speech. That's because it seems natural that two negatives make the negation stronger.
"I ain't got time" doesn't sound as emphatic as "I ain't got no time".
But the English teachers of the world are united in condemning the double negative and their view is likely to stick.